Podcast appearances and mentions of elie hassenfeld

It's the season of giving: colorful paper and shiny bows, sure, and charitable giving, too. In this special episode, Jacob Goldstein, the host of What's Your Problem, gets smart about donating. Did you know that spending money on others makes you happier than spending money on yourself? Or that altruistic nerds have discovered four of the most impactful charities in the world (per dollar spent)? Have you ever wondered how poker players think about giving? Dr. Laurie Santos from The Happiness Lab, Elie Hassenfeld of GiveWell, and Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business talk about how to maximize your giving – and why you'll be happy you did. Link to donate: https://givingmultiplier.org/happinesslab Listen to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Listen to Risky BusinessSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With kids very much on the team's mind we thought it would be fun to review some comments about parenting featured on the show over the years, then have hosts Luisa Rodriguez and Rob Wiblin react to them. Links to learn more and full transcript.After hearing 8 former guests' insights, Luisa and Rob chat about:Which of these resonate the most with Rob, now that he's been a dad for six months (plus an update at nine months).What have been the biggest surprises for Rob in becoming a parent.How Rob's dealt with work and parenting tradeoffs, and his advice for other would-be parents.Rob's list of recommended purchases for new or upcoming parents.This bonus episode includes excerpts from:Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (from episode #157)Holden Karnofsky on freezing embryos and being surprised by how fun it is to have a kid (#110 and #158)Parenting expert Emily Oster on how having kids affect relationships, careers and kids, and what actually makes a difference in young kids' lives (#178)Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (#87)Spencer Greenberg on his surveys of parents (#183)Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing global problems (#153)Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (#172)Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently with kids (#174)Chapters:Cold open (00:00:00)Rob & Luisa's intro (00:00:19)Ezra Klein on parenting yourself as well as your children (00:03:34)Holden Karnofsky on preparing for a kid and freezing embryos (00:07:41)Emily Oster on the impact of kids on relationships (00:09:22)Russ Roberts on empirical research when deciding whether to have kids (00:14:44)Spencer Greenberg on parent surveys (00:23:58)Elie Hassenfeld on how having children reframes his relationship to solving pressing problems (00:27:40)Emily Oster on careers and kids (00:31:44)Holden Karnofsky on the experience of having kids (00:38:44)Bryan Caplan on homeschooling (00:40:30)Emily Oster on what actually makes a difference in young kids' lives (00:46:02)Nita Farahany on thinking about life and the world differently (00:51:16)Rob's first impressions of parenthood (00:52:59)How Rob has changed his views about parenthood (00:58:04)Can the pros and cons of parenthood be studied? (01:01:49)Do people have skewed impressions of what parenthood is like? (01:09:24)Work and parenting tradeoffs (01:15:26)Tough decisions about screen time (01:25:11)Rob's advice to future parents (01:30:04)Coda: Rob's updated experience at nine months (01:32:09)Emily Oster on her amazing nanny (01:35:01)Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic ArmstrongContent editing: Luisa Rodriguez, Katy Moore, and Keiran HarrisTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Intro I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast is a great show. Despite the world of podcasts overflowing with content to choose from, it's reliably been a high-quality production that's been a regular part of my listening habits ever since I discovered it. It was also probably one of the first routes I become more aware of the EA community, which I suspect I might not be alone by.[1] So, as the podcast numbers ticked up, the vague idea to write up a post shouting out some of my favourite episodes took root. I didn't get far with it from there, and now the unreasonable effectiveness of the 80k podcast production team has forced my hand! So in the post I'm going to link to my 10 favourite episodes, along with some final thoughts at the end. I hope to share with you some of my favourite episodes, but I [...] ---Outline:(00:07) Intro(01:12) My Top 10(01:16) 10-4(01:19) 10: #144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe(01:54) 9: #175 – Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child(02:26) 8: #139 – Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value(03:00) 7: #153 – Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWells approach, and six lessons from their recent work(03:39) 6: #129 – Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination(04:15) 5: #185 – Lewis Bollard on the 7 most promising ways to end factory farming, and whether AI is going to be good or bad for animals(05:00) 4: #67 – David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness(05:40) Top 3(05:43) 3: #43 – Daniel Ellsberg on the creation of nuclear doomsday machines, the institutional insanity that maintains them, and how they could be dismantled(06:22) 2: #145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasnt inevitable(07:07) 1: #100 – Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome(07:51) Final Thoughts(07:54) Honourable Mentions(08:10) #52 – Glen Weyl on radical institutional reforms that make capitalism and democracy work better, and how to get them(08:52) #116 – Luisa Rodriguez on why global catastrophes seem unlikely to kill us all(09:29) #190 – Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious(09:59) But JWS, where are the AI episodes?(12:03) EpilogueThe original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: September 9th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C8HWX3XsoB3krSkbm/my-top-10-picks-from-200-episodes-of-the-80k-podcast --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My top 10 picks from 200 episodes of the 80k podcast, published by JWS on September 9, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Intro I think the 80,000 Hours Podcast is a great show. Despite the world of podcasts overflowing with content to choose from, it's reliably been a high-quality production that's been a regular part of my listening habits ever since I discovered it. It was also probably one of the first routes I become more aware of the EA community, which I suspect I might not be alone by.[1] So, as the podcast numbers ticked up, the vague idea to write up a post shouting out some of my favourite episodes took root. I didn't get far with it from there, and now the unreasonable effectiveness of the 80k podcast production team has forced my hand! So in the post I'm going to link to my 10 favourite episodes, along with some final thoughts at the end. I hope to share with you some of my favourite episodes, but I want to be clear that this is my list and not any sort of official ranking. If there's a really good episode that your surprised isn't on there, it may well because I haven't listened to that one yet! So, without any further ado, here's the Top 10 List: My Top 10 10-4 10: #144 - Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of the fundamental phenomena in our universe While the podcast's title is nominally about cancer, I think the ideas in the podcast actually hint towards Autopoiesis, something I think connects a bunch of different causes I care about. I wasn't really aware of many of the things that Athena and Rob discuss in the episode so I found the discussing incredibly interesting, especially about how the concepts of growth, maintenance, and co-operation appear at many different levels in the universe. 9: #175 - Lucia Coulter on preventing lead poisoning for $1.66 per child LEEP is probably one of the key EA success stories in recent years but hearing it through Lucia's own words and her own story, from CE incubation to actually bringing the results of lead concentration to the Malawi Ministry of Health, was really inspiring to hear. There's also some good discussion about the 10% Pledge and the age-old Randomista v Growth debate in the episode too. 8: #139 - Alan Hájek on puzzles and paradoxes in probability and expected value This was another excellent episode where Rob and an incredbily smart, engaging guest got to do a deep dive into an idea and see where it went. I think Professor Hájek did a fantastic job sharing his knowledge in an enlightening way, and he really showcased a number of limits of expect value calculations (not least the realisation the probability(0) events can and do happen all the time) which left my mind blown in a good way. 7: #153 - Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent work GiveWell looms large in the world of EA, so to get the CEO to come on the podcast and talk in this detail was great to see. I found Elie both an engaging guest and a persuasive interlocutor when he and Rob get into debates, and this definitely didn't seem like a softball interview to me. The Randomista v Growth section (at 02:20:00) is really good on this, and I wish Rob had actually put himself on the line a bit more since he clearly has a lot of sympathy with the 'Growth' side of the debate. 6: #129 - Dr James Tibenderana on the state of the art in malaria control and elimination This podcast comes in at over 3 hours, but still I found it flying by as a listener. The topics range from the specific work of Maleria Consortium, the overall landscape of the battle against Malaria, as well as James' own story, including fighting off the disease himself. There's some much rich discussion that it feels like any of these could have been an episode on its own, so to get all 3-in-1 firmly puts th...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject, published by Parker Conley on March 31, 2024 on LessWrong. TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos - aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I'll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others. What are Tacit Knowledge Videos? Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows: Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery. In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I'm not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward. For the purpose of this post, Tacit Knowledge Videos are any video that communicates "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". Here are some examples: Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of "Research Walkthroughs". AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like. GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007-2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings. Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matushak "helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy". I found it interesting to have a peek into Matushak's spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers. Call to Action Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon - the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules: Recall a video that you've seen that communicates tacit knowledge - "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two YouTube searches? If not, share it. Post the title and the URL of the video. Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don't let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again - quantity, not quality.)[1] For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matushak also has some working notes about this idea generally. Additionally, DM or email me (email in L...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject, published by Parker Conley on March 31, 2024 on LessWrong. TL;DR Tacit knowledge is extremely valuable. Unfortunately, developing tacit knowledge is usually bottlenecked by apprentice-master relationships. Tacit Knowledge Videos could widen this bottleneck. This post is a Schelling point for aggregating these videos - aiming to be The Best Textbooks on Every Subject for Tacit Knowledge Videos. Scroll down to the list if that's what you're here for. Post videos that highlight tacit knowledge in the comments and I'll add them to the post. Experts in the videos include Stephen Wolfram, Holden Karnofsky, Andy Matuschak, Jonathan Blow, George Hotz, and others. What are Tacit Knowledge Videos? Samo Burja claims YouTube has opened the gates for a revolution in tacit knowledge transfer. Burja defines tacit knowledge as follows: Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery. In my observation, domains like housekeeping and cooking have already seen many benefits from this revolution. Could tacit knowledge in domains like research, programming, mathematics, and business be next? I'm not sure, but maybe this post will help push the needle forward. For the purpose of this post, Tacit Knowledge Videos are any video that communicates "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". Here are some examples: Neel Nanda, who leads the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, has a playlist of "Research Walkthroughs". AI Safety research is discussed a lot around here. Watching research videos could help instantiate what AI research really looks and feels like. GiveWell has public audio recordings of its Board Meetings from 2007-2020. Participants include Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, Timothy Ogden, Rob Reich, Tom Rutledge, Brigid Slipka, Cari Tuna, Julia Wise, and others. Influential business meetings are not usually made public. I feel I have learned some about business communication and business operations, among other things, by listening to these recordings. Andy Matuschak recorded himself studying Quantum Mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and doing research. Andy Matushak "helped build iOS at Apple and led R&D at Khan Academy". I found it interesting to have a peek into Matushak's spaced repetition practice and various studying heuristics and habits, as well as his process of digesting and taking notes on papers. Call to Action Share links to Tacit Knowledge Videos below! Share them frivolously! These videos are uncommon - the bottleneck to the YouTube knowledge transfer revolution is quantity, not quality. I will add the shared videos to the post. Here are the loose rules: Recall a video that you've seen that communicates tacit knowledge - "knowledge that can't properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction". A rule of thumb for sharing: could a reader find this video through one or two YouTube searches? If not, share it. Post the title and the URL of the video. Provide information indicating why the expert in the video is credible. (However, don't let this last rule stop you from sharing a video! Again - quantity, not quality.)[1] For information on how to best use these videos, Cedric Chin and Jacob Steinhardt have some potentially relevant practical advice. Andy Matushak also has some working notes about this idea generally. Additionally, DM or email me (email in L...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My quick thoughts on donating to EA Funds' Global Health and Development Fund and what it should do, published by Vasco Grilo on December 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I think there is a strong case for donating to EA Funds' Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) if one wants to support interventions in global health and development without attending to their effects on animals. On the other hand, given this goal, I believe one had better donate to GiveWell's All Grants Fund (AGF) or unrestricted funds (GWUF), or Giving What We Can's (GWWC's) Global Health and Wellbeing Fund (GHWF). In addition, I encourage GHDF to: Let its donors know that donating to GHDF in its current form has a similar effect to donating to AGF (if that is in fact the case). Consider appointing additional fund managers independent from GiveWell. Consider accepting applications. In any case, the goal of this post is mostly about starting a discussion about the future of GHDF rather than providing super informed takes about it. So feel free to share your thoughts or vision below! Case for donating to GiveWell's All Grants Fund or unrestricted funds Donating to AGF or GWUF instead of GHDF seems better if one highly trusts GiveWell's prioritisation: Donating to GHDF in its current form appears to have the same effect as donating to AGF or GWUF: Like AGF and GWUF, GHDF "aims to improve the health or economic empowerment of people around the world as effectively as possible". My understanding is that GHDF makes more uncertain or riskier grants than GiveWell's Top Charities Fund[1] (TCF), but AGF, launched in August 2022, now makes such grants too. AGF funds: GiveWell's top charities. Organisations implementing potentially cost-effective and scalable programs. Established organisations implementing cost-effective programs that GiveWell does not expect to scale. Organisations aiming to influence public health policy. Organisations producing research to aid our grantmaking process. Organizations that raise funds for our recommended charities. GHDF "is managed by Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell's co-founder [and CEO]". GHDF does not accept applications, and neither does AGF. People in the United Kingdom can support GiveWell's funds and top charities through tax deductible donations via GiveWell UK, which was launched in August 2022 as AGF. Having EA Funds as an additional intermediary seems unnecessary unless it is doing some extra evaluation, which does not appear to be the case. As a side note, I would also say there is a pretty small difference between which one of GiveWell's funds, TCF, AGF or GWUF, one donates to: Due to funging, more donations to TCF will result in AGF granting less money to GiveWell's top charities. GiveWell arguably has tiny room for more funding given Open Philanthropy's support, so donating to GWUF is similar to donating to AGF[2]. However, if you highly trust GiveWell's prioritisation, donating to GWUF is the best option given its greatest flexibility, followed by the AGF and TCF. Yet, donors may prefer donating to TCF to facilitate explanations of their effective giving (e.g. skipping the need to go into expected value or funging). Case for donating to Giving What We Can's Global Health and Wellbeing Fund Donating to GHWF instead of GHDF seems better if one: Welcomes further evaluation of the process behind the recommendations of GiveWell and other evaluators in the global health and wellbeing space (e.g. Happier Lives Institute), trusts GWWC's research team to identify evaluators to rely on, and wants the evaluations to be published, as in GWWC's evaluations of evaluators. These would be my main reasons for donating to GHWF instead of GHDF, which has not produced public evaluations of GiveWell's recommendations. Is open to donating to funds or organisations not suppo...

Here on the podcast we're always on the lookout for the biggest bang for our buck. Picture this: you, in the grocery store aisle, pondering the cosmic significance of toilet paper prices and whether the fancy stuff is going to be worth it! Or maybe you're weighing a couple job offers: you're not just negotiating salary, you're out there considering the 401k match, turning job hunting into a strategic sport! We're all about optimizing our lives for maximum value, but are we extending this same strategic approach to the dollars we give to charity? Maybe... or maybe not! That's why we've roped in the philanthropic virtuoso, Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder of GiveWell, a nonprofit committed to finding charities that perform life-saving and life-improving work without breaking the bank. It's financial optimization meets world-saving wisdom. Listen as we discuss the founding of GiveWell, the ways some charities have fallen short, SBF and his impact on effective altruism, Elie's rule of thumbs for how much to give, if it's OK to give locally even if it doesn't have the biggest impact, and plenty more!   Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances: Knowing your ‘money gear' is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here.  Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It's fun, free, & practical. Join a thriving community of fellow money in the HTM Facebook group. Find the best credit card for you with our new credit card tool! Massively reduce your cell phone bill each month by switching to a discount provider like Mint Mobile.   During this episode we enjoyed a Chonk-ibal by Other Half Brewing- a big thanks to Jason for sending this one our way! And please help us to spread the word by letting friends and family know about How to Money! Hit the share button, subscribe if you're not already a regular listener, and give us a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Help us to change the conversation around personal finance and get more people doing smart things with their money!   Best friends out!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When then-hedge fund manager Elie Hassenfeld began his philanthropic journey in 2006, he knew that he wanted to get the most charitable bang for his buck. He quickly realized, however, that detailed data on charitable impact simply didn't exist. So he and Holden Karnovsky founded GiveWell, an organization inspired by effective altruism that identifies the charities that save or improve lives the most for every dollar given. Listen as Hassenfeld, GiveWell's CEO, explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts how GiveWell determines the small number of charities they recommend to achieve optimal impact. They also discuss the dangers of an over-reliance on data and the case for bucketing our philanthropy to allow for local or personal giving.

This is a selection of highlights from episode #153 of The 80,000 Hours Podcast.These aren't necessarily the most important, or even most entertaining parts of the interview — and if you enjoy this, we strongly recommend checking out the full episode:Elie Hassenfeld on two big picture critiques of GiveWell's approach, and six lessons from their recent workAnd if you're finding these highlights episodes valuable, please let us know by emailing podcast@80000hours.org.Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript.Highlights put together by Simon Monsour and Milo McGuire

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: GWWC Newsletter: June 2023, published by Giving What We Can on July 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Hello and welcome to our June newsletter!Pop quiz! If you travelled to visit every person who's taken the GWWC pledge, how many different countries would you visit?Answer: 100 countries! With the newest addition of Uzbekistan , Giving What We Can members are present in 100 countries worldwide! Turns out the idea of giving to help others effectively has universal appeal! Even though our movement is growing, we need your help - talking to your friends, family and colleagues is one of the best ways to help us change the norms around giving, which in turn means faster progress on some of the world's biggest issues.We'd love to know how we can help you talk to the people in your life about high-impact charities and how we can help you advocate. (We already have lots of ideas and resources here)If you have any ideas about what you would find helpful, simply reply or send me a quick email at: grace.adams@givingwhatwecan.org.Below you'll find loads of interesting updates from our partner charities and other news we think you'll like! With gratitude, - Grace Adams & the Giving What We Can team News & Updates Community Our Executive Director Luke Freeman recently published a post on the EA Forum about the role of individuals in helping to fund high-impact projects and charities as well as hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) about his work, life and more! Director of Research, Sjir Hoeijmakers published a post on the EA Forum with “Four claims about the role of effective giving in the EA Community”. Power for Democracies is a new non-profit democracy charity evaluator based in Berlin, Germany, and operating globally. They are looking to hire 5-6 democracy enthusiasts to form their ‘Knowledge & Research Team'. The objective of the team is twofold: To build and execute a ‘knowledge-building roadmap' that will lead to a growing set of methodologies for identifying highly effective pro-democracy interventions and potential NGOs to apply them. And to use these methodologies to generate giving recommendations for the international community of democracy-focused, effectiveness-driven donors. Magnify Mentoring is still accepting mentee applications from women, non-binary, and trans people of any gender who are enthusiastic about pursuing high-impact career paths for the next day or two. On average, mentees and mentors meet once a month for 60-90 minutes. Magnify Mentoring offers mentees access to a broader community with a wealth of professional and personal expertise. You can find out more here and apply here. Evaluators, grantmakers and incubators Updates to ACE's Charity Evaluation Criteria in 2023: Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is entering its 2023 charity evaluation season! This is the time of year when ACE works to identify charities that can do the most good for animals with two years of additional funding. To provide more transparency and insight into its evaluation process, ACE is sharing some changes it made to its four charity evaluation criteria this year. ACE's Updated Strategic Plan: One year ago, in 2022, ACE developed a strategic plan for the period of 2022–2024. This plan, created collectively by ACE staff under the leadership of the Acting Executive Director and approved by the board of directors, was the result of the hard work and dedication of a severely understaffed team. It represented what was needed then. Things have changed since last year. ACE added several talented individuals to their team, including new leadership and board members. ACE now has an updated strategic plan and is looking forward to testing its assumptions and delivering results. GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld was interviewed on the 80,000 Hours podcast about newer areas of ...

GiveWell is one of the world's best-known charity evaluators, with the goal of "searching for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar." It mostly recommends projects that help the world's poorest people avoid easily prevented diseases, like intestinal worms or vitamin A deficiency.But should GiveWell, as some critics argue, take a totally different approach to its search, focusing instead on directly increasing subjective wellbeing, or alternatively, raising economic growth?Today's guest — cofounder and CEO of GiveWell, Elie Hassenfeld — is proud of how much GiveWell has grown in the last five years. Its 'money moved' has quadrupled to around $600 million a year.Its research team has also more than doubled, enabling them to investigate a far broader range of interventions that could plausibly help people an enormous amount for each dollar spent. That work has led GiveWell to support dozens of new organisations, such as Kangaroo Mother Care, MiracleFeet, and Dispensers for Safe Water.But some other researchers focused on figuring out the best ways to help the world's poorest people say GiveWell shouldn't just do more of the same thing, but rather ought to look at the problem differently.Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.Currently, GiveWell uses a range of metrics to track the impact of the organisations it considers recommending — such as 'lives saved,' 'household incomes doubled,' and for health improvements, the 'quality-adjusted life year.' The Happier Lives Institute (HLI) has argued that instead, GiveWell should try to cash out the impact of all interventions in terms of improvements in subjective wellbeing. This philosophy has led HLI to be more sceptical of interventions that have been demonstrated to improve health, but whose impact on wellbeing has not been measured, and to give a high priority to improving lives relative to extending them.An alternative high-level critique is that really all that matters in the long run is getting the economies of poor countries to grow. On this view, GiveWell should focus on figuring out what causes some countries to experience explosive economic growth while others fail to, or even go backwards. Even modest improvements in the chances of such a 'growth miracle' will likely offer a bigger bang-for-buck than funding the incremental delivery of deworming tablets or vitamin A supplements, or anything else.Elie sees where both of these critiques are coming from, and notes that they've influenced GiveWell's work in some ways. But as he explains, he thinks they underestimate the practical difficulty of successfully pulling off either approach and finding better opportunities than what GiveWell funds today. In today's in-depth conversation, Elie and host Rob Wiblin cover the above, as well as:Why GiveWell flipped from not recommending chlorine dispensers as an intervention for safe drinking water to spending tens of millions of dollars on themWhat transferable lessons GiveWell learned from investigating different kinds of interventionsWhy the best treatment for premature babies in low-resource settings may involve less rather than more medicine.Severe malnourishment among children and what can be done about it.How to deal with hidden and non-obvious costs of a programmeSome cheap early treatments that can prevent kids from developing lifelong disabilitiesThe various roles GiveWell is currently hiring for, and what's distinctive about their organisational cultureAnd much more.Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.Producer: Keiran HarrisAudio mastering: Simon Monsour and Ben CordellTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Taking a leave of absence from Open Philanthropy to work on AI safety, published by Holden Karnofsky on February 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I'm planning a leave of absence (aiming for around 3 months and potentially more) from Open Philanthropy, starting on March 8, to explore working directly on AI safety. I have a few different interventions I might explore. The first I explore will be AI safety standards: documented expectations (enforced via self-regulation at first, and potentially government regulation later) that AI labs won't build and deploy systems that pose too much risk to the world, as evaluated by a systematic evaluation regime. (More here.) There's significant interest from some AI labs in self-regulating via safety standards, and I want to see whether I can help with the work ARC and others are doing to hammer out standards that are both protective and practical - to the point where major AI labs are likely to sign on. During my leave, Alexander Berger will serve as sole CEO of Open Philanthropy (as he did during my parental leave in 2021). Depending on how things play out, I may end up working directly on AI safety full-time. Open Philanthropy will remain my employer for at least the start of my leave, but I'll join or start another organization if I go full-time. The reasons I'm doing this: First, I'm very concerned about the possibility that transformative AI could be developed soon (possibly even within the decade - I don't think this is >50% likely, but it seems too likely for my comfort). I want to be as helpful as possible, and I think the way to do this might be via working on AI safety directly rather than grantmaking. Second, as a general matter, I've always aspired to help build multiple organizations rather than running one indefinitely. I think the former is a better fit for my talents and interests. At both organizations I've co-founded (GiveWell and Open Philanthropy), I've had a goal from day one of helping to build an organization that can be great without me - and then moving on to build something else. I think this went well with GiveWell thanks to Elie Hassenfeld's leadership. I hope Open Philanthropy can go well under Alexander's leadership. Trying to get to that point has been a long-term project. Alexander, Cari, Dustin and I have been actively discussing the path to Open Philanthropy running without me since 2018.1 Our mid-2021 promotion of Alexander to co-CEO was a major step in this direction (putting him in charge of more than half of the organization's employees and giving), and this is another step, which we've been discussing and preparing for for over a year (and announced internally at Open Philanthropy on January 20). I've become increasingly excited about various interventions to reduce AI risk, such as working on safety standards. I'm looking forward to experimenting with focusing my energy on AI safety. Footnotes This was only a year after Open Philanthropy became a separate organization, but it was several years after Open Philanthropy started as part of GiveWell under the title “GiveWell Labs.” ↩ Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

For the past decade, Giving Tuesday has been a way for everyday Americans to donate their money, or time, to charities and causes that help collectively make the world a better place. Whether it's a little or a lot, we're encouraged to give what we can to bridge the gap between those that have so little and many of us that have so much. But how do you know a charity or organization is using your donation accordingly? How can you spot-check to see if your dollars are being used for those in dire need?We brought on Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell co-founder and CEO, to help us navigate the tricky subject of giving to worthwhile charities. Elie knows a thing or two about validating which charities are worth donating to. At GiveWell, he spends his days researching thousands of charities for hundreds of millions of donatable dollars, helping those of us that are too busy to find a home for the donations that we are willing to give.In just six tips, Elie will give you the framework for finding a worthwhile charity or organization to give to, so you know that your dollar is being stretched the farthest it can. We also touch on whether or not high administration costs are ared flag, whether it's better to give goods rather than money, and how to truly measure an organization's impact to see how many lives they're saving or improving with each dollar donated. If you're still on the fence about where to give this Giving Tuesday, head over to GiveWell.org to know your dollar is making a difference! In This Episode We CoverWhy donating overseas has much more of an economic impact than domestic donationsHow GiveWell validates the charities they approve and how to do the same in your local areaTop tips for finding a charity that will use your dollar for its highest useRed flags to watch out for when researching charities and organizationsGiveWell's past mistakes and how they're using them to grow a better organizationTop charities that both GiveWell and BiggerPockets recommend donating to (like CrossPurpose!)And So Much More!Links from the ShowFind an Investor-Friendly Real Estate AgentBiggerPockets Money Facebook GroupBiggerPockets ForumsFinance Review Guest OnboardingMindy's TwitterScott's InstagramListen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One PlaceApply to Be a Guest on The Money ShowPodcast Talent Search!Subscribe to The “On The Market” YouTube ChannelListen to The “On The Market” Podcast: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, BiggerPocketsCheck Out Mindy's 2022 Live Spending Tracker and BudgetGive Well Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-358Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Check out our sponsor page!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Amy Labenz gives some closing remarks to close out the conference, a talk by GiveWell's Elie Hassenfeld and Olivia Larsen. View the original talk and video here.Over the last 16 years, GiveWell has grown from a group of friends discussing their charitable giving to an organization that directed over $500 million to extremely cost-effective giving opportunities in global health and development in 2021. GiveWell's CEO, Elie Hassenfeld, recounts lessons learned from that growth, share about GiveWell's plans for future growth, and discuss how you can help!Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet.Effective Altruism is a social movement dedicated to finding ways to do the most good possible, whether through charitable donations, career choices, or volunteer projects. EA Global conferences are gatherings for EAs to meet. You can also listen to this talk along with its accompanying video on YouTube.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Changing the world through slack & hobbies, published by Steven Byrnes on July 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Also posted on LessWrong) Introduction In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often seem to talk about are (1) “direct work” in a job that furthers a very important cause; (2) “earning to give”; (3) earning “career capital” that will help you do those things in the future, e.g. by getting a PhD or teaching yourself ML. By contrast, there's not much talk of: (4) being in a job / situation where you have extra time and energy and freedom to explore things that seem interesting and important. But that last one is really important! Examples For example, here are a bunch of things off the top of my head that look like neither “direct work” nor “earning-to-give” nor “earning career capital”: David Denkenberger was a professor of mechanical engineering. As I understand it (see here), he got curious about food supplies during nuclear winter, and started looking into it in his free time. One thing led to another, and he now leads ALLFED, which is doing very important and irreplaceable work. (Denkenberger seems to have had no prior formal experience in this area.) I'm hazy on the details, but I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom developed much of their thinking about AGI & superintelligence via discussions on online mailing lists. I doubt they were being paid to do that! Meanwhile, Stuart Russell got really into AGI safety / alignment during a sabbatical. The precursor to GiveWell was a “charity club” started by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, where they and other employees at their hedge fund “pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to” (source), presumably in their free time. I mean seriously, pretty much anytime anybody anywhere has ever started something really new, they were doing it in their free time before they were paid for it. Three ingredients to a transformative hobby Ingredient 1: Extra time / energy / slack Honestly, I wasn't really sure whether to put it on the list at all. Scott Alexander famously did some of his best writing during a medical residency—not exactly a stage of life where one has a lot of extra free time. (See his discussion here.) Another excellent blogger / thinker, Zvi Mowshowitz, has been squeezing his blogging / thinking into his life as a pre-launch startup founder and parent. Or maybe those examples just illustrate that, within the “time / energy / slack” entry, “time” is a less important component than one might think. As they say, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it”. (Well, within limits—obviously, as free time approaches literally zero, hobbies approach zero as well.) Note a surprising corollary to this ingredient: “direct work” (in the EA sense) and transformative hobbies can potentially work at cross-purposes! For example, at my last job, I was sometimes working on lidar for self-driving cars, and sometimes working on military navigation algorithms, and meanwhile I was working on AGI safety as a hobby (more on which below). Now, I really want there to be self-driving cars ASAP. I think they're going to save lots of lives. They'll certainly save me a lot of anguish as a parent! And we had a really great technical approach to automobile lidar—better than anything else out there, I still think. And (at certain times) I felt that the project would live or die depending on how hard I worked to come up with brilliant solutions to our various technical challenges. So during the periods when I was working on the lidar project, and I had extra time at night, or was thinking in the shower, I was thinking about lidar. And thus my AGI safety hobby progressed slower. By contrast—well, I have complicated op...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Changing the world through slack & hobbies, published by Steven Byrnes on July 21, 2022 on LessWrong. (Also posted on EA Forum) Introduction In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often seem to talk about are (1) “direct work” in a job that furthers a very important cause; (2) “earning to give”; (3) earning “career capital” that will help you do those things in the future, e.g. by getting a PhD or teaching yourself ML. By contrast, there's not much talk of: (4) being in a job / situation where you have extra time and energy and freedom to explore things that seem interesting and important. But that last one is really important! Examples For example, here are a bunch of things off the top of my head that look like neither “direct work” nor “earning-to-give” nor “earning career capital”: David Denkenberger was a professor of mechanical engineering. As I understand it (see here), he got curious about food supplies during nuclear winter, and started looking into it in his free time. One thing led to another, and he now leads ALLFED, which is doing very important and irreplaceable work. (Denkenberger seems to have had no prior formal experience in this area.) I'm hazy on the details, but I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom developed much of their thinking about AGI & superintelligence via discussions on online mailing lists. I doubt they were being paid to do that! Meanwhile, Stuart Russell got really into AGI safety / alignment during a sabbatical. The precursor to GiveWell was a “charity club” started by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, where they and other employees at their hedge fund “pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to” (source), presumably in their free time. I mean seriously, pretty much anytime anybody anywhere has ever started something really new, they were doing it in their free time before they were paid for it. Three ingredients to a transformative hobby Ingredient 1: Extra time / energy / slack Honestly, I wasn't really sure whether to put it on the list at all. Scott Alexander famously did some of his best writing during a medical residency—not exactly a stage of life where one has a lot of extra free time. (See his discussion here.) Another excellent blogger / thinker, Zvi Mowshowitz, has been squeezing his blogging / thinking into his life as a pre-launch startup founder and parent. Or maybe those examples just illustrate that, within the “time / energy / slack” entry, “time” is a less important component than one might think. As they say, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it”. (Well, within limits—obviously, as free time approaches literally zero, hobbies approach zero as well.) Note a surprising corollary to this ingredient: “direct work” (in the EA sense) and transformative hobbies can potentially work at cross-purposes! For example, at my last job, I was sometimes working on lidar for self-driving cars, and sometimes working on military navigation algorithms, and meanwhile I was working on AGI safety as a hobby (more on which below). Now, I really want there to be self-driving cars ASAP. I think they're going to save lots of lives. They'll certainly save me a lot of anguish as a parent! And we had a really great technical approach to automobile lidar—better than anything else out there, I still think. And (at certain times) I felt that the project would live or die depending on how hard I worked to come up with brilliant solutions to our various technical challenges. So during the periods when I was working on the lidar project, and I had extra time at night, or was thinking in the shower, I was thinking about lidar. And thus my AGI safety hobby progressed slower. By contrast—well, I have complicated opinions about militar...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Changing the world through slack & hobbies, published by Steven Byrnes on July 21, 2022 on LessWrong. (Also posted on EA Forum) Introduction In EA orthodoxy, if you're really serious about EA, the three alternatives that people most often seem to talk about are (1) “direct work” in a job that furthers a very important cause; (2) “earning to give”; (3) earning “career capital” that will help you do those things in the future, e.g. by getting a PhD or teaching yourself ML. By contrast, there's not much talk of: (4) being in a job / situation where you have extra time and energy and freedom to explore things that seem interesting and important. But that last one is really important! Examples For example, here are a bunch of things off the top of my head that look like neither “direct work” nor “earning-to-give” nor “earning career capital”: David Denkenberger was a professor of mechanical engineering. As I understand it (see here), he got curious about food supplies during nuclear winter, and started looking into it in his free time. One thing led to another, and he now leads ALLFED, which is doing very important and irreplaceable work. (Denkenberger seems to have had no prior formal experience in this area.) I'm hazy on the details, but I believe that Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom developed much of their thinking about AGI & superintelligence via discussions on online mailing lists. I doubt they were being paid to do that! Meanwhile, Stuart Russell got really into AGI safety / alignment during a sabbatical. The precursor to GiveWell was a “charity club” started by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, where they and other employees at their hedge fund “pooled in money and investigated the best charities to donate the money to” (source), presumably in their free time. I mean seriously, pretty much anytime anybody anywhere has ever started something really new, they were doing it in their free time before they were paid for it. Three ingredients to a transformative hobby Ingredient 1: Extra time / energy / slack Honestly, I wasn't really sure whether to put it on the list at all. Scott Alexander famously did some of his best writing during a medical residency—not exactly a stage of life where one has a lot of extra free time. (See his discussion here.) Another excellent blogger / thinker, Zvi Mowshowitz, has been squeezing his blogging / thinking into his life as a pre-launch startup founder and parent. Or maybe those examples just illustrate that, within the “time / energy / slack” entry, “time” is a less important component than one might think. As they say, “if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it”. (Well, within limits—obviously, as free time approaches literally zero, hobbies approach zero as well.) Note a surprising corollary to this ingredient: “direct work” (in the EA sense) and transformative hobbies can potentially work at cross-purposes! For example, at my last job, I was sometimes working on lidar for self-driving cars, and sometimes working on military navigation algorithms, and meanwhile I was working on AGI safety as a hobby (more on which below). Now, I really want there to be self-driving cars ASAP. I think they're going to save lots of lives. They'll certainly save me a lot of anguish as a parent! And we had a really great technical approach to automobile lidar—better than anything else out there, I still think. And (at certain times) I felt that the project would live or die depending on how hard I worked to come up with brilliant solutions to our various technical challenges. So during the periods when I was working on the lidar project, and I had extra time at night, or was thinking in the shower, I was thinking about lidar. And thus my AGI safety hobby progressed slower. By contrast—well, I have complicated opinions about militar...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Neil Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, published by GiveWell on April 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I am excited to share that GiveWell Managing Director Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a major global health organization working across a range of issues including malaria prevention and maternal and neonatal health. This news is bittersweet for me. I'm sad to be losing the talent, advice, and thought partnership Buddy brought to GiveWell, but I'm thrilled that he is taking up this position—the global health sector will be stronger for it. CHAI is gaining a great leader in Buddy. But perhaps more importantly for GiveWell and our supporters, this appointment is a signal that effective giving is contributing to more corners of the global health landscape than ever before. Buddy is a strong champion of impact maximization, and I am excited that he will apply this lens in his new role. I am also pleased that this transition does not mark the end of Buddy's relationship with GiveWell. It is important that GiveWell maintain strong connections with leading organizations in the global health sector. With Buddy at the helm of CHAI, there will be another important voice advocating for programs that increase health outcomes as much as possible per dollar spent. We wish our best to Buddy in his new role, and we look forward to maximizing impact together for many years to come. Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell Co-Founder and CEO Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

How does GiveWell's approach to charity differ from other charitable organizations? Why does GiveWell list such a small number of recommended charities? How does GiveWell handle the fact that different moral frameworks measure causes differently? Why has GiveWell increased its preference for health-related causes over time? How does GiveWell weight QALYs and DALYs? How much does GiveWell rely on a priori moral philosophy versus people's actual moral intuitions? Why does GiveWell have such low levels of confidence in some of its most highly-recommended charities or interventions? What should someone do if they want to be more confident that their giving is actually having a positive impact? Why do expected values usually tend to drop as more information is gathered? How does GiveWell think about second-order effects? How much good does the median charity do? Why is it so hard to determine how impactful charities are? Many charities report on the effectiveness of individual projects, but why don't more of them report on their effectiveness overall as an organization? Venture capitalists often diversify their portfolios as much as possible because they know that, even though most startups will fail, one unicorn can repay their investments many times over; so, in a similar way, why doesn't GiveWell fund as many projects as possible rather than focusing on a few high performers? Why doesn't GiveWell recommend more animal charities? Does quantification sometimes go too far?Elie Hassenfeld co-founded GiveWell in 2007 and currently serves as its CEO. He is responsible for setting GiveWell's strategic vision and has grown the organization into a leading funder in global health and poverty alleviation, directing over $500 million annually to high-impact giving opportunities. Since 2007, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion to outstanding charities. Elie co-led the development of GiveWell's research methodology and guides the research team's agenda. He has also worked closely with donors to help them define their giving strategies and invest toward them. Prior to founding GiveWell, Elie worked in the hedge fund industry. He graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a B.A. in religion.{% include partials/ukraine.md %}

Read the full transcriptHow does GiveWell's approach to charity differ from other charitable organizations? Why does GiveWell list such a small number of recommended charities? How does GiveWell handle the fact that different moral frameworks measure causes differently? Why has GiveWell increased its preference for health-related causes over time? How does GiveWell weight QALYs and DALYs? How much does GiveWell rely on a priori moral philosophy versus people's actual moral intuitions? Why does GiveWell have such low levels of confidence in some of its most highly-recommended charities or interventions? What should someone do if they want to be more confident that their giving is actually having a positive impact? Why do expected values usually tend to drop as more information is gathered? How does GiveWell think about second-order effects? How much good does the median charity do? Why is it so hard to determine how impactful charities are? Many charities report on the effectiveness of individual projects, but why don't more of them report on their effectiveness overall as an organization? Venture capitalists often diversify their portfolios as much as possible because they know that, even though most startups will fail, one unicorn can repay their investments many times over; so, in a similar way, why doesn't GiveWell fund as many projects as possible rather than focusing on a few high performers? Why doesn't GiveWell recommend more animal charities? Does quantification sometimes go too far?Elie Hassenfeld co-founded GiveWell in 2007 and currently serves as its CEO. He is responsible for setting GiveWell's strategic vision and has grown the organization into a leading funder in global health and poverty alleviation, directing over $500 million annually to high-impact giving opportunities. Since 2007, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion to outstanding charities. Elie co-led the development of GiveWell's research methodology and guides the research team's agenda. He has also worked closely with donors to help them define their giving strategies and invest toward them. Prior to founding GiveWell, Elie worked in the hedge fund industry. He graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a B.A. in religion.

Read the full transcript here. How does GiveWell's approach to charity differ from other charitable organizations? Why does GiveWell list such a small number of recommended charities? How does GiveWell handle the fact that different moral frameworks measure causes differently? Why has GiveWell increased its preference for health-related causes over time? How does GiveWell weight QALYs and DALYs? How much does GiveWell rely on a priori moral philosophy versus people's actual moral intuitions? Why does GiveWell have such low levels of confidence in some of its most highly-recommended charities or interventions? What should someone do if they want to be more confident that their giving is actually having a positive impact? Why do expected values usually tend to drop as more information is gathered? How does GiveWell think about second-order effects? How much good does the median charity do? Why is it so hard to determine how impactful charities are? Many charities report on the effectiveness of individual projects, but why don't more of them report on their effectiveness overall as an organization? Venture capitalists often diversify their portfolios as much as possible because they know that, even though most startups will fail, one unicorn can repay their investments many times over; so, in a similar way, why doesn't GiveWell fund as many projects as possible rather than focusing on a few high performers? Why doesn't GiveWell recommend more animal charities? Does quantification sometimes go too far?Elie Hassenfeld co-founded GiveWell in 2007 and currently serves as its CEO. He is responsible for setting GiveWell's strategic vision and has grown the organization into a leading funder in global health and poverty alleviation, directing over $500 million annually to high-impact giving opportunities. Since 2007, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion to outstanding charities. Elie co-led the development of GiveWell's research methodology and guides the research team's agenda. He has also worked closely with donors to help them define their giving strategies and invest toward them. Prior to founding GiveWell, Elie worked in the hedge fund industry. He graduated from Columbia University in 2004 with a B.A. in religion.[Read more]

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Wicked Problem Experience, published by HoldenKarnofsky on March 2, 2022 on LessWrong. I've spent a lot of my career working on wicked problems: problems that are vaguely defined, where there's no clear goal for exactly what I'm trying to do or how I'll know when or whether I've done it. In particular, minimal-trust investigations - trying to understand some topic or argument myself (what charity to donate to, whether civilization is declining, whether AI could make this the most important century of all time for humanity), with little reliance on what “the experts” think - tend to have this “wicked” quality: I could spend my whole life learning about any subtopic of a subtopic of a subtopic, so learning about a topic is often mostly about deciding how deep I want to go (and what to skip) on each branch. There aren't any stable rules for how to make that kind of decision, and I'm constantly changing my mind about what the goal and scope of the project even is. This piece will narrate an example of what it's like to work on this kind of problem, and why I say it is “hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet.” My example is from the 2007 edition of GiveWell. It's an adaptation from a private doc that some other people who work on wicked problems have found cathartic and validating. It's particularly focused on what I call the hypothesis rearticulation part of investigating a topic (steps 3 and 6 in my learning by writing process), which is when: I have a hypothesis about the topic I'm investigating. I realize it doesn't seem right, and I need a new one. Most of the things I can come up with are either “too strong” (it would take too much work to examine them satisfyingly) or “too weak” (they just aren't that interesting/worth investigating). I need to navigate that balance and find a new hypothesis that is (a) coherent; (b) important if true; (c) maybe something I can argue for. After this piece tries to give a sense for what the challenge is like, a future piece will give accumulated tips for navigating it. Flashback to 2007 GiveWell Context for those unfamiliar with GiveWell: In 2007, I co-founded (with Elie Hassenfeld) an organization that recommends evidence-backed, cost-effective charities to help people do as much good as possible with their donations. When we started the project, we initially asked charities to apply for $25,000 grants, and to agree (as part of the process) that we could publish their application materials. This was our strategy for trying to find charities that could provide evidence about how much they were helping people (per dollar). This example is from after we had collected information from charities and determined which one we wanted to rank #1, and were now trying to write it all up for our website. Since then, GiveWell has evolved a great deal and is much better than the 2007 edition I'll be describing here. (This example is reconstructed from my memory a long time later, so it's probably not literally accurate.) Initial “too strong” hypothesis. Elie (my co-founder at GiveWell) and I met this morning and I was like “I'm going to write a page explaining what GiveWell's recommendations are and aren't. Basically, they aren't trying to evaluate every charity in the world. Instead they're saying which ones are the most cost-effective.” He nodded and was like “Yeah, that's cool and helpful, write it.” Now I'm sitting at my computer trying to write down what I just said in a way that an outsider can read - the “hypothesis articulation” phase. I write, “GiveWell doesn't evaluate every charity in the world. Our goal is to save the most lives possible per dollar, not to create a complete ranking or catalogue of charities. Accordingly, our research is oriented around identifying the single charity that can save the most l...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Wicked Problem Experience, published by HoldenKarnofsky on March 2, 2022 on LessWrong. I've spent a lot of my career working on wicked problems: problems that are vaguely defined, where there's no clear goal for exactly what I'm trying to do or how I'll know when or whether I've done it. In particular, minimal-trust investigations - trying to understand some topic or argument myself (what charity to donate to, whether civilization is declining, whether AI could make this the most important century of all time for humanity), with little reliance on what “the experts” think - tend to have this “wicked” quality: I could spend my whole life learning about any subtopic of a subtopic of a subtopic, so learning about a topic is often mostly about deciding how deep I want to go (and what to skip) on each branch. There aren't any stable rules for how to make that kind of decision, and I'm constantly changing my mind about what the goal and scope of the project even is. This piece will narrate an example of what it's like to work on this kind of problem, and why I say it is “hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet.” My example is from the 2007 edition of GiveWell. It's an adaptation from a private doc that some other people who work on wicked problems have found cathartic and validating. It's particularly focused on what I call the hypothesis rearticulation part of investigating a topic (steps 3 and 6 in my learning by writing process), which is when: I have a hypothesis about the topic I'm investigating. I realize it doesn't seem right, and I need a new one. Most of the things I can come up with are either “too strong” (it would take too much work to examine them satisfyingly) or “too weak” (they just aren't that interesting/worth investigating). I need to navigate that balance and find a new hypothesis that is (a) coherent; (b) important if true; (c) maybe something I can argue for. After this piece tries to give a sense for what the challenge is like, a future piece will give accumulated tips for navigating it. Flashback to 2007 GiveWell Context for those unfamiliar with GiveWell: In 2007, I co-founded (with Elie Hassenfeld) an organization that recommends evidence-backed, cost-effective charities to help people do as much good as possible with their donations. When we started the project, we initially asked charities to apply for $25,000 grants, and to agree (as part of the process) that we could publish their application materials. This was our strategy for trying to find charities that could provide evidence about how much they were helping people (per dollar). This example is from after we had collected information from charities and determined which one we wanted to rank #1, and were now trying to write it all up for our website. Since then, GiveWell has evolved a great deal and is much better than the 2007 edition I'll be describing here. (This example is reconstructed from my memory a long time later, so it's probably not literally accurate.) Initial “too strong” hypothesis. Elie (my co-founder at GiveWell) and I met this morning and I was like “I'm going to write a page explaining what GiveWell's recommendations are and aren't. Basically, they aren't trying to evaluate every charity in the world. Instead they're saying which ones are the most cost-effective.” He nodded and was like “Yeah, that's cool and helpful, write it.” Now I'm sitting at my computer trying to write down what I just said in a way that an outsider can read - the “hypothesis articulation” phase. I write, “GiveWell doesn't evaluate every charity in the world. Our goal is to save the most lives possible per dollar, not to create a complete ranking or catalogue of charities. Accordingly, our research is oriented around identifying the single charity that can save the most l...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Wicked Problem Experience, published by Holden Karnofsky on March 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Cross-posted from Cold Takes I've spent a lot of my career working on wicked problems: problems that are vaguely defined, where there's no clear goal for exactly what I'm trying to do or how I'll know when or whether I've done it. In particular, minimal-trust investigations - trying to understand some topic or argument myself (what charity to donate to, whether civilization is declining, whether AI could make this the most important century of all time for humanity), with little reliance on what “the experts” think - tend to have this “wicked” quality: I could spend my whole life learning about any subtopic of a subtopic of a subtopic, so learning about a topic is often mostly about deciding how deep I want to go (and what to skip) on each branch. There aren't any stable rules for how to make that kind of decision, and I'm constantly changing my mind about what the goal and scope of the project even is. This piece will narrate an example of what it's like to work on this kind of problem, and why I say it is “hard, taxing, exhausting and a bit of a mental health gauntlet.” My example is from the 2007 edition of GiveWell. It's an adaptation from a private doc that some other people who work on wicked problems have found cathartic and validating. It's particularly focused on what I call the hypothesis rearticulation part of investigating a topic (steps 3 and 6 in my learning by writing process), which is when: I have a hypothesis about the topic I'm investigating. I realize it doesn't seem right, and I need a new one. Most of the things I can come up with are either “too strong” (it would take too much work to examine them satisfyingly) or “too weak” (they just aren't that interesting/worth investigating). I need to navigate that balance and find a new hypothesis that is (a) coherent; (b) important if true; (c) maybe something I can argue for. After this piece tries to give a sense for what the challenge is like, a future piece will give accumulated tips for navigating it. Flashback to 2007 GiveWell Context for those unfamiliar with GiveWell: In 2007, I co-founded (with Elie Hassenfeld) an organization that recommends evidence-backed, cost-effective charities to help people do as much good as possible with their donations. When we started the project, we initially asked charities to apply for $25,000 grants, and to agree (as part of the process) that we could publish their application materials. This was our strategy for trying to find charities that could provide evidence about how much they were helping people (per dollar). This example is from after we had collected information from charities and determined which one we wanted to rank #1, and were now trying to write it all up for our website. Since then, GiveWell has evolved a great deal and is much better than the 2007 edition I'll be describing here. (This example is reconstructed from my memory a long time later, so it's probably not literally accurate.) Initial “too strong” hypothesis. Elie (my co-founder at GiveWell) and I met this morning and I was like “I'm going to write a page explaining what GiveWell's recommendations are and aren't. Basically, they aren't trying to evaluate every charity in the world. Instead they're saying which ones are the most cost-effective.” He nodded and was like “Yeah, that's cool and helpful, write it.” Now I'm sitting at my computer trying to write down what I just said in a way that an outsider can read - the “hypothesis articulation” phase. I write, “GiveWell doesn't evaluate every charity in the world. Our goal is to save the most lives possible per dollar, not to create a complete ranking or catalogue of charities. Accordingly, our research is oriented around identi...

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show Episode: How to Do the Most GoodRelease date: 2021-10-05Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky's current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn't find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil's areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we're living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that's come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.You probably won't agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that's only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy's career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.Mentioned:The "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky's blog, Cold TakesGiveWellMore on Open Philanthropy's approach to worldview diversification“What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism” by William MacAskill“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective” by Charles I. JonesBook recommendations:Due Diligence by David RoodmanThe Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. KellyThe Precipice by Toby OrdYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% )Episode: How to Do the Most GoodRelease date: 2021-10-05Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky's current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn't find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil's areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we're living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that's come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.You probably won't agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that's only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy's career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.Mentioned:The "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky's blog, Cold TakesGiveWellMore on Open Philanthropy's approach to worldview diversification“What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism” by William MacAskill“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective” by Charles I. JonesBook recommendations:Due Diligence by David RoodmanThe Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. KellyThe Precipice by Toby OrdYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky's current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn't find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil's areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we're living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that's come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.You probably won't agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that's only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy's career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.Mentioned:The "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky's blog, Cold TakesGiveWellMore on Open Philanthropy's approach to worldview diversification“What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism” by William MacAskill“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective” by Charles I. JonesBook recommendations:Due Diligence by David RoodmanThe Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. KellyThe Precipice by Toby OrdYou can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Elie, the CEO and co-founder of GiveWell, discusses his organization’s latest research, his views on economic growth, and what he’s changed his mind on lately (among other topics). Elie co-founded GiveWell in 2007 alongside Holden Karnofsky. He also helps to set the strategy and oversee the work of Open Philanthropy, and chairs EA Funds’ Global … Continue reading Virtual EAG 2020: Q&A with Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and CEO at GiveWell

How do you determine what charities to donate to, how much you should give, and if the money you do give is even going to the cause those charities support? Elie Hassenfeld, co-founder and executive director of GiveWell, is here to shed some light on how to donate effectively. GiveWell is a non-profit that conducts research and investigations into charitable organizations to determine which have the highest-impact. In this episode, Chad and Elie discuss the future of philanthropy and some things to keep in mind when you donate your time and money. Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

Source: GiveWell.

Elie Hassenfeld and I spoke about the charity he co-founded with Holden Karnofsky, GiveWell, and how it analyses charities to determine how effective they are at alleviating suffering. We also spoke about Open Philanthropy Project, a sister organisation of GiveWell, which started with the question of "How can we accomplish as much good as possible with our giving?" https://www.givewell.org/ https://www.openphilanthropy.org/

Elie Hassenfeld and Sean Conley discuss GiveWell's #1 ranked top charity, the Against Malaria Foundation. (Music: 8bit Five by Cullah.)

Source: Harvard Effective Altruism (original video).